


A Goal Without A Plan

by Phritzie



Series: The Woman Dies [1]
Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: Agender!Sliske, Bisexuality, Can't Stress the Stalking Tag Enough Actually, Canon-Typical Violence, Drunk Blow Jobs, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Quest Spoilers (Ritual of the Mahjarrat and onwards), Recreational Drug Use, Semi-Public Sex, Stalking, Unhealthy Coping Choices / Alcohol Abuse, Unhealthy Relationships, Weak Hypnotic Suggestion / Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-07-08 07:15:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19865623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phritzie/pseuds/Phritzie
Summary: From Merriam-Webster,wish(noun)1  a  :an act or instance of desire2  b  :a request or command3  :an invocation of good or evil fortune





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was it.

This was the manifestation of prophecy that had escaped his clutches. Nosing an itch away on her shoulder. Lowering eyes so softened by drink they might’ve been the only vacancy in the Dragon that night to ponder her empty pint glass.

_Never meet your idols._

Disenchantment held the curse at bay. Not the band, cramped shoulder to shoulder into a corner, harpsichord singing in clipped notes, organist durging away at the keys on what passed for an instrument in the age of Man. Nor was it the bartender’s watchful keep over her weeknight patronage. A dishrag threadbare from the combination of frugality and time waved crescents over a murky bench, but she wasn’t about to be a barrier to him, preoccupied with a different sort of troublemaker.

Frankly, the troubadours could’ve benefited from a fundamental change in perspective themselves. Their performance was far from innovative, and while he hadn’t tolerated the whole composition, what he’d stumbled into sounded like someone was either due to be wed or next on stage for the eulogy.

So the sincerity of his disappointment was depressing enough to forestall his planned actions. Just a spell, of course, as that didn’t fit with his vow to be home and in bed by sunrise, or whatever his ward had wrung out of him the evening prior, but he couldn’t abide any blame for feeling let down.

His hunt had been quick, uncomplicated by stiffness or pain. Her face set her apart from most Kandarins, but she didn’t seem to suffer difficulties communicating with anyone, no trouble enduring foreign ethos. Companions didn't grace her travels, at least not during that time; she’d thus far journeyed alone, on foot and by water, eschewing teleportation to compromise for some fear or apprehension of magic he didn’t quite understand yet.

Though tonight she’d clearly made an acquaintance.

The tavern was packed to the gills with people.

A few looked his way when he came in, beating red dust loose from full skirts, but none of them were paying the right kind of attention.

Felix Belger wouldn’t be missed for even a moment.

Sliske pitied her immediately.

It was hard to regret the trip. Should he have let her go? The eponymous prize? Sinking into her own body, once so unfettered by the earth beneath her?

He could reconcile heroism and alcohol. But this didn't seem like a fair start to what he’d anticipated to be a satisfactory working relationship. She was practically dead already, a figure not so much sat upon but poured into a chair nearest the door leading out to the township’s stables, as if her escort expected she’d soon be due to give up what had most definitely gone down too fast and planned to drag her off to consummate under guttered lamps what all the noise was promising. A bright rash of color burned her ears, cheeks, and throat, and the smile on her face as she cooed at the furred trapper running their fingertips up and down her arm said, in resounding, large print – _SORRY, NOBODY’S HOME, PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER_ – an option Sliske liked for them very little more than he enjoyed wearing wool.

The milling conversations of people who spent most of their lives within miles of each other carried on beneath the music, bodies standing between him and his quarry.

He decided his best option was to get closer.

Negotiating them with painfully subdued insistence paid in the sight of the trapper doing a hack job of coaxing her into a doubtlessly rousing constitutional among night-blind, stinking horses. If he’d the patience or inclination, Sliske would’ve liked to see them try and bend her over a hay bale without getting trampled to death in the dark.

Paces away from confronting her he squeezed past someone gilding the bartop. They called out to him, but there wasn’t the time for chitchat – _slippery, she was so fast, don’t let her get away_ – and so his brusque dismissal was rewarded with a grope.

Unsure if he was insulted or amused, Sliske turned to assess them. Lean in the limbs. Soft everywhere else. Fair-haired. The childlike roundness of their face and its provoking smirk.

A pinch. A pinch on the bum, in a tavern.

It was just so laughably inelegant. Almost enough to make him feel young again. That was probably why he chose to break character.

Casting a fraction of his mounting displeasure back at them, the smug purse of their lips creased with confusion, and then, like having never seen maggots, rapturous horror, as they took in the face of a woman ravaged by undeath. What accompanying reactions began above the meridian coursed swiftly downward, a vital flinch to protect themselves overcorrecting for a stumbled leap backwards that sent them toppling into the unwilling embrace of another patron.

“Watch it!” the innocent one barked, pinned by the handsy one, and shoved.

Sliske rubbed his arse where it whined a bit and watched.

His patsy had cleared space enough to breathe, but his assailant was still spooked useless, flailing and jabbering with fear, head on a swivel to find the door as they both grappled with each other for vertical stability.

Their predicament was solved by the barkeep.

She thumped aside the shover with a slippery elbow, wasting nothing but a stained towel irritably flung on another stunned figure Sliske hadn’t bothered addressing. Hand searching along their wet front to pluck at the collar of an ale-drenched coat, he took them for a farmhand from how the sun’s brown brand ended on them there.

“ _Jacob Higgs,”_ the now empty stein glass-wielding purveyor growled. “Boy, what in the _fuck–”_

“That,” the farmhand said, fisting their own shirt and yanking on it, “was my beer.”

 _Ah,_ he thought wisely, toeing away from the impending brawl. _And that’s why we tip our servers first, Mr. Higgs._

What had once been a random distribution of people began to move toward the scene he was vacating. He’d gone with shorter, more for the novelty of being able to shapeshift again than any prearranged designs on enhanced maneuverability. His advantage in temporary smallness prevailed nonetheless, ducking and weaving around those about to willingly bear witness to the kind of altercation that would, _rest assured_ , continue to take place long after they were departed.

Though what he lacked in stature he also lost in perceived strength.

A group five across blocked his path. When they turned their chins away at an honest attempt to wriggle past them, Sliske took a moment to inhale deeply, intent on preoccupying himself with the blessing of new vitality lest the whole thing be ruined by his peaking frustration.

The centering exercise was needless.

Hands attached to wrists poking out from the ragged tarp of a larupia’s pelt pried apart the center, and probably would’ve dealt Sliske the same courtesy if he hadn’t swept forward to take the trapper’s place, ducking through the disgruntled archway of jeering barflies and coming hip-to-edge with the table Felix was still falling asleep at.

She tipped her head back to regard him with a glassy blink. Almost without preamble, she gestured him toward the chair beside her.

Somewhere behind him and over the harpsichord droning its way through the same song’s bridge for a dozenth time, a voice began to call for wagers.

“Your conscience hightails it north for a summer to play soldier _–”_

A stein hitting any surface was never especially pleasant to his ears, less the sound of it being pounded into flesh as multiple victims cried charges of poor treatment.

“And you have the gall to stir up trouble in _my_ business _–”_

Even if it was clear she was pulling her punches.

Sliske sat down.

Felix leaned in to speak.

He considered interrupting her. This wasn’t a conversation that required two. In fact, if she’d had any sense of prescience, she should’ve already been running.

_You don’t want to see this ridiculousness, do you? We ought to leave._

At this range, in her state. It wouldn’t take much.

_Closer, please, the racket’s got my ear._

A glove closed around the back of his neck.

Sliske moved to look, alarmed at the trapper’s grip and how it would be a chore to sever their hand without utterly dissolving any pretense of the appearance a Watch guard had loaned him, and was pulled gently but insistently back in toward Felix’s approaching face.

Until it got kind of weird, to be truthful, and then beyond that. Until their noses pressed together.

Despite her obvious intoxication, and with startling clarity, she spoke.

“You stole my ride.”

He frowned at the harsh, fruity vapors accompanying her accusation.

“That yokel was going to ravish you.”

The grim sort of acknowledgement Sliske expected from kings grieving nations glinted in her eyes.

“I was counting on it.”

Sliske opened his mouth to express his comprehension and got a tongue for his troubles instead.

“What,” he moaned, wresting her away long enough for Felix to go for his jugular.

Before he’d the thought to guard against lethal attack, hot pressure was applied to the space under his jaw.

In a cascade of impulses conspiring against whatever original intent Sliske possessed, his resistance to the reformed idea surrounding her ability to hold her drink, and his complete surrender to the mouth pulling a responsiveness that had lain dormant for somewhere on the order of one hundred years from his nerve-endings, he was no longer eavesdropping on the world’s least impressive fistfight.

Felix looked up at him from where she was kneeling with arms tucked under the weighty pool of his dress.

Stars twinkled overhead.

Most of his upper body throbbed.

Though it seemed his original plot to recruit his brother’s latest ‘friend’ had soured quite phenomenally, this was the second wind he’d been waiting for in the bar. How they’d made it outside so easily amidst the chaos Sliske was unable to parse from below a violently thrumming chemical euphoria.

_Strange._

The messy hiking of skirts ceased as Felix pulled a triangle of fabric through the belt looped around his waist.

_I don’t remember this part._

“I saw you staring at me in there,” Felix said, breath ticklish. Teeth flashed, stripping away the leathers guarding her hands. Sliske had to tilt his head at a severe angle to see what she was up to, damp fingers transferring their warmth into his skin and working loose the ties of her own trousers. “Hard to tell sometimes. Not you, though.” She dipped forward. Wet heat ran a stripe along the join of a stranger’s pelvis, out cold where he’d propped them in the shadows of the tower. Her dry, scraping laugh chilled the moisture left behind. “Girl on a mission.”

“Yes,” Sliske admitted, hypnotized. He gave an experimental thrust in response to the tongue still teasing the border of hip and genital. Her licking paused where she was, unsteadied eyes darting up to regard him. The muscle retracted.

Swaying on her heels, Felix wormed a hand in alongside the crisscross of cords holding up her clothing. He felt the deep sense of unreality that’d fogged over his thoughts lately grow thicker as it began to stroke her.

Of all the things to concern himself with, _that can’t be comfortable_ passed from his mind to his mouth, in one format or another, and she obliged his counsel by kneeling up to slide the trousers – _different, thinner, not what she was wearing before –_ down her thighs.

“You want me like this?”

Her voice was different, too. Dramatically altered by whatever came out of those taps, the stiff airs of foolish bravery masking both her terror and the biting cold of Ghorrock apparently not Felix’s standard tenor besides. But even more so in the fold of night, shored up against one of the inn’s retaining walls as that blasted organ drummed rising vibrations into his back. She sounded so very _absorbed_.

“Do you do this often?” Sliske asked absently, more aware of how his present body was beginning to stick to his shirts than how shifting his legs apart seemed to alleviate the pressure building behind his forehead.

But his movements didn’t go unnoticed by Felix, and something of a quick study, he would eventually learn to expect it when she groaned and turned to nuzzle into him, stopping herself short of mouthing him where he was exposed to anyone that cared to venture outside the tavern's sidedoor.

“ _Please,”_ she said instead, venting ruinously hot air. Swallowing another question, Sliske watched the hand between her legs stutter and flex. “I’m not–I’m good for it.”

This display wasn’t any less pitiful than her earlier sluggishness, and he might’ve spared a thought for the indignity she was enduring, and might’ve regularly endured, to have a crack at what he would’ve honestly described as homely women in rags. But more pressingly:

“I just wanted you to come with me.”

A little abrupt, but. There. A fair trade of information. Perhaps she’d answer him before he grew weary of the disorder she was creating inside of him and reanimated her.

Either way, he’d answered her question honestly. There would be no reason for it to linger as a point of disrepute for her to hold against him. And certainly not for the rest of eternity.

_Here’s looking at you, Dharok._

As Sliske lifted his hand to thread together a whispering bolt of what would take her gifts and make them his to enjoy, Felix relaxed, the taut line of her spine arching, and breathed:

“ _Oh._ ”

His concentration flickered.

“I can do that.”

And the way her eyelids relaxed as she pulled long, slickened fingers out of herself only to push them inside him scattered what remained of it.

* * *

He was tearing through the lowest levels of the compound when Relomia found him.

“ _No_.”

Like a poorly behaved dog, Sliske heaved enough mortar and cobbles aside for him to stand in and did so, prepared to dig further if need be to escape her ceaseless haranguing. “ _Leave me be.”_

“Just _stop,_ ” she said, small, tired, voice supernaturally unscarred by long days of picking and screeching at each other for reasons neither of them actually understood.

He did. Rather abruptly, squatting in the broadest corner the hole provided.

“You will not.”

“I won’t.”

And Relomia didn't. She stayed put, hanging there in the eaves of the great cavern yawning out from the impromptu door he’d fashioned into subsection C’s hall, bare with clay, rock, and all other things which dwelt hidden in the deep earth until he’d applied claw and panic to them.

They each waited for the other to say something; for her to move, setting him off again, or for him to do the same to himself bearing down on the blank, gray wall shielding his mind from –

Relomia jerked forward and caught herself as he began to stand. “Wait! Wait. Please. Talk to me. Talk.”

“Of what?” _The smell?_

“Well…”

Of all the things he could’ve forgotten. Humans, living humans, specifically living humans that liked to pull him into alleyways and _secrete all over him_.

Sex. It had such a pervasive odor, cloying, and he wasn’t accustomed to his ablutions yet – _bone, exposed muscle, water, bad combo_.

And with that intimacy, every odd, individual stray aroma along until next she bathed, what was in the lake before it was clouds, before it was rain, the place she’d slept last, warm sebum and hair inextricable from the taste of sweat beading over those oils, pooling, _salty,_ the _noises_ she made because of the _noises_ he made when he _remembered how salty_.

Sliske shuddered a mountain's worth of frustration through his mouth and nose.

“Of _what_ , you bothersome–”

“A story.”

Laughter felt like ripping apart, and that was very close, perhaps too close, to the energy relentlessly shearing him into large, coiling ribbons. But it would do for a stepstone.

“And some coals for your blessed little feet, my darling?” Gasping. Maybe even drowning. “Before I sing you to sleep?”

“One I’ve never heard before.”

He stopped laughing.

The cavern carried the echo so far as her wide-eyed frown before it dissipated into something lesser, and then, finally, nothing. Sliske held his thoughts in that silence as well as he could manage, processing her appeal, burning with the kind of hormonal rage typically allotted to youth – _you_ are _youth_ – and receiving naught from her for it but a firming of her eyebrow’s severe tilt.

With intent, his stare left her face, traveled along the bowl of the ceiling, dropped to the messy, illogical scar sloping into his present grave, and finally to the sorry, steaming corpse inside of it.

Or more accurately his legs and feet. Right then, they were smudged with brown clumps, and uncomfortably hot, but otherwise unspoiled by time. Skin springy. Markings aglow. Remade.

Very much all at once the sick hammer of his heart slowed.

Sliske continued totaling his own body, breathing, thinking not of any particular tale he hadn’t yet spun for his ward, but instead trying to remember all those he had, because by number the former far outweighed the latter, and unless he talked himself sore day in and out for a hundred more years, it probably always would.

“Relomia,” he said, lucidity once more his. For the moment. "I am old."

He heard the pall of her dark skirts swirl the agitated dust about them higher.

There wasn’t a very good response she could’ve given to that. Sliske granted her some credit for not attempting one.

“There are times when I find myself at a loss for memory.”

Right cheek bunching into one smooth wrinkle, he concluded the journey of mapping his torso – rigid, bent from scraping away at the ground for hours and clenching his abdomen – at the nails buried in a loose grip to either side of him. Pulling them out, he commenced with grooming, chiseling repulsively colored wedges from beneath each claw.

Below this new attempt at composure he was still simmering. It would continue that way for months yet.

“You should benefit from some degree of accuracy.”

* * *

He went back.

It was a horrible decision, but he did.

And it hardly mattered that he was dressed tip to tip in black, or that he didn’t have the right accent to be slinking around Rellekka. She didn’t care that he let her do little else than palm his chest and gasp into his ear as they rutted off against each other’s thighs.

Felix took a shine to the Fremennik, her northern cloaks like diaphanous storm clouds, just like she’d polished the southern Watch guard with the plain, scratchy wool of one unaccustomed to flocking their hems. It was all without logic, at first. It was all new.

Then ensuing not long after, perhaps days, at most a week if he could bear the temptation, there was the rougher seer, too eager, somehow, for her tastes, but not too eager to overlook, and then a trial before Sliske even knew that was what it would become, the fishmonger lashed to a crate in his storehouse off to try his hand in the islands. In Felix. In himself.

And Gods but what she really thought of that he wouldn’t know until at least a year on, because she fell asleep in the hold – they were drinking, she was never without the companion of inebriation in the weeks following the Ritual, it seemed, endlessly running from sobriety, and he was pursuing her twice as persistently – when Sliske’d had it, _had it_ with her burying her face in him and he'd needed release from foreign flesh, from _any_ flesh, but she’d crawled up right on top of him, restively butting that impermissible hair into his chin with each pass of his hand over her arse as he gradually knuckled under through the fight on whether to extract from the situation or keep on with his own needs.

But the ship whining through a particular hardship of seafaring woke her.

Felix took stock of the thickly set, groggy, frankly malodorously-fishy man lying under her with most of his hand up his front – the other getting there in the back, and she pressed nipping kisses into the slope of his neck, whispering _yes_ like a litany. And Sliske didn’t have a choice anymore.

* * *

“Picture a place without light.”

Relomia would. For this, she needn’t try hard. Her own experiences should’ve leant enough scenery for his theatrics to pale in comparison. But there was something about this she adored, something that mattered enough to discard recollection for a minute or two. It was apparent in her bearing. The soft glint in her eye. Chasing his figure around the room, but not seeing it. Looking inward. Elsewhere.

Fire crackled in the hearth as he prowled along its open maw, hand treading the mantle and loosening long-settled debris from the pocked surface.

“You are a commoner of darkness, a peasant of the shadows. Gnawing hunger fuels your drives. You are exhausted with the tedium of the hunt, but ever-searching, always wanting for another meal that rarely comes.” Sliske drew his arms in the air and made puppets of trees along the tarnished floor. “You have set out after a night of the same into a morning which looks no different to you, not in hope of breakfast, but the deep rage that if what relief you seek is not found, then pain will soon come.”

Charcoals glowed beneath a matte blanket of ash. They flared brighter every time his robes disturbed the underground air enough to fan the flames, sending sparks out into the condemned dining room.

Relomia had taken up floating in a corseted dining chair, burgundy-red fabric long turned a bluish gray over years of disuse. She’d tucked up her sleeves and balanced her chin on each palm, rapt.

“Then, one such morning,” he continued, face a reckoning of emotion and path approaching her chair once more, “you hear it. A sound, deliciously vulnerable and to your ears almost tangibly sweet, because you know that if you are quick enough, it will be yours to snuff out.”

Sliske whirled on the spot. Clamped his claws down around either side of the chair's tall back so that it rocked, and Relomia in a parody with it, her flinching shock the illusion.

“There she is. A woman,” harsh scratches descended the backing to grip the middle and pull, slowly. Taking the suggestion, his ward floated forward, “if that, has intruded upon your domain,” continuing until Sliske knew his frame, at full height, blocked out all but the thinnest, dancing corona of heat, “and you are reasonably confident that she is _not_.”

Such that the firelight,

“ _Going_.”

the only light in the large emptiness of the room,

“ _To escape_.”

wreathed his hood and shoulders like a cape.

* * *

“I hear you’re on something of a crusade.”

Face like sand wouldn’t chafe in her mouth, Felix offered a placid, unassuming shift to the left and then rapped on the bar. “Maybe. Not so urgent that it can’t wait until morning.”

He accepted the offer. Reflections doubled in the spigots of the taps looming over them marked his care and her flippancy. “It’s their cause and I’m conveniently stupid.”

 _While I can't exactly disagree with that..._ “And I’m curious.”

Apparently, an impossibly vivid shade of scarlet was resonating with modern Asgarnian women. Sliske couldn’t say he disapproved. Several chin-length strands fell over his face dipping closer to whisper in her ear. “How much can you tell me about them before it becomes a problem?”

Felix closed her eyes and leaned into it. “They serve the king. Kill things that weasel their way into places they shouldn’t be,” she murmured, rotating to inhale some of the fumes common to such colorful hair treatments. In the adjoining space, patrons shuffled and reassigned the position of heavy, painted game pieces. “I don’t mind, but do we have to talk about this?”

Sliske was facing her less a quarter turn to the bar. When he got a hand fastened around her upper thigh without attracting the notice of the barmaid Felix's throat clicked hard against his nose. “ _Rachael_.”

“Humor me.”

Felix parched the break beginning to strain her voice. “Alright.” She slid her stein out of elbow range and propped herself against his stool's armrests, the varnish awash with fingerprints. “All over the world, there are these... guardians. One of them is having trouble keeping up with their job.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “But you aren’t the only hungry thing in the dark.”

He eased up on the chair, permitting space for her to counter what he could acknowledge constituted flagrantly ahistorical presumptions.

Four shallow rents filled that space with a hiss of mist. Red eyes darted across his, searching out any trace of revulsion in their even regard of her. “Who else?”

The trouble wasn’t that he had no intentions.

“Others,” Sliske swore grimly. “Wanting only for their own gratification. Knowing nothing of altruism.”

Though she claimed to remember several years from her time among the living, she _looked_ like a devil, and when she was fucked off with him, she could do just fine pretending to be one.

“So, you wonder, will you close the gap before they do?”

Relomia had proven herself to be one of the most high-spirited cohorts he’d known in millennia. Simply put, she was fun.

Index fingers traded places gouging worthless furniture. “Hindclaw to opposite foreclaw, foreclaw to opposite heel, tunnels flying fast beneath you, you emerge from the ground. There she is, trapped at the bottom of a ravine, and you’ve the motivation to descend it. But something is wrong.”

Abruptly allowing his solemn look to pinch into a beast’s perceptive grimace, his snout grew longer, wild and snuffling. Relomia was forced to duck to avoid the wide swing of his head.

“My–” she stuttered, plainly tickled. “My lord, that’s–”

“The scent of,” a few more confirming, ridiculous drags, “feeding," _snfsnfsnfsnfsnf_ , "is already here. You were too late. Or,” he said, placing special emphasis on the angle with which he tipped backward, “perhaps, in a way, too early.”

She shut out the burning nimbus surrounding him and sighed.

The trouble was those intentions were strictly custodial.

They always had been. From the moment he’d found her, stooped in remains, mouth seeping smoke while she gorged in numberless quantities of her dark kindred’s vitality, Sliske had never thought of Relomia as anything less than his spiritual successor.

He was given to thinking she shared the sentiment.

* * *

“And that’s all I know,” Felix said. She rolled a wrist around in her standard hunt for clarity. “Or care to know, of that.”

Sliske was equally unconcerned, and he gave voice to his laxity in the game steward’s soprano. It was a matter for another to concern themselves with. Someone less engaged with tendering drunk Void Knights into wine cellars so they could fumble around in secret like adolescents.

A lurching scoff. “I’m not a knight.” Familiar caresses traced the path from his neck to the dip at his waist. “Unless… you’re into that kind of stuff.”

Chivalry or the sentinels who upheld it weren't usually what he went for, no. And because the opportunity to sleep with one hadn’t really presented itself to him yet, Sliske wasn’t certain he could be ruled out as, to borrow the parlance, _into that_. But there was a way to find out.

“I might be.” 

Her face wasn’t visible anymore, deep in Burthorpe castle’s underbelly, sensing by touch and the muted feedback soft soled boots tapped on flagstones – but he could taste the prickle of cold ozone a finely milled essence had lent her breath when Felix hoisted him into her arms like a bride and bestowed on him a fittingly chaste kiss.

“Then let’s play pretend,” she teased.

* * *

Sometimes when one door closes another opens.

As hopeful as any philosophy he’d ever encountered, Sliske was partial to the idea that the doors, in this phrase, were not solely a reflection of opportunities lost and gained, but that a _deeper,_ psychosexual _significance lay nestled in the subtextual imagery called forth by the overtly yonic nature of_ pulling _on a small,_ firm _orb to compel_ entry _into a larger, darker_ ho _-_

Grating laughter cut through the rest of that thought – as well it should’ve – and the tide pitching deafeningly over the pier swallowed it.

Sliske let his frame sink deeper into the overhang across the street.

Whoever’s sharp wit had interrupted him tapped a neighboring, squat silhouette he recognized as the musty neem scent rolling down the stoop into his hiding spot. They extended a glowing light, and the shorter one spat out their toothbrush to accept it.

The study of Man predated man. Sliske had been looking to younger races for enlightening lessons in his own existence for far longer. Certainly before humans had surveyed the most intact continents they could find and then carved those lands to pieces for themselves.

In a different life, he’d passed off hobby as necessity – a conventional _know thine enemy_ – and that’d survived deeper investigation right until the others had realized the true breadth of his academic zeal.

Undoubtedly, focusing his observations on an individual case in the name of profiling whatever discriminations might’ve influenced the framework of her sexual tendencies was a little different than, say, wheeling out theory on the vampyric breeding culture in costume. And he didn’t have a script, now. Or much of a statement to make.

Not even considering the appallingly transparent inspiration, _he_ would be the sole beneficiary, entertaining bored toffs no longer the base structure of his creativity.

Felix’s hypothetical response to being understood like that was for him to thrill over in private. Sliske didn’t see many enjoying the implication their motive for taking up the arrow had any connection to an as-yet clear response to penetration – that is, being penetrated and penetrator – or that one enjoyed a muff in their face because their mother had been neglectful.

Frankly, he didn’t find the practice of diagnosing desire very stimulating anyhow.

 _And I’ve no evidence she has parentage, no suggestion anyone made her at all. In fact, I’m not completely certain she didn’t spring fully formed from my imagination_ –

“Pass?” the hilarious one offered, remarking on their companion’s lapse in smoking to dig around in their pockets.

“I’m good,” the one with cleaner teeth confirmed, holding it aloft for them to take back and patting their own backside. “Hey, Gerrant, did you see me–I think I left it–”

 _Gerrant_ , Sliske amended, shook a striker at _Pearly_ and then used it. “In your coat, Y. Left side. No, the other left.” A thin cloud that made his nose crinkle sparkled with oily humidity from the lamp over the door. “I’m going in. You should too. You’re all numb from the cold I’d bet.”

 _Y_ muttered irritable, placating nonsense as a hand met the shape of the possession in question, squeezing excessively.

His curiosity was testable. Felix’s behavior proposed – like any discerning creature of want – _some_ manner of preference in her bedmates. Sliske would need to establish under what conditions she beheld him, but while his options were, to his knowledge, infinite, simply offering her a carnival of faces was eventually going to result in the same rejection he’d known the night before.

Familiar footfalls crunched through the lace of an early frost.

And he wasn’t fond of wasting his time.

“Did you fall in?” Y called, still fondling a pocket.

* * *

She crossed arms under her cloak, thumbs burrowing snug into the tiny spot of blazing heat between. Enshadowed by the blacksmith’s tower all day, and bitter with ocean wind at night, the northern dock was one wobbly step removed from a bad swim. She’d taken her sweet time, and she’d take it again, thanks.

Felix lifted elbows at her least favorite greengrocer. “What’re you still doing out here? It’s fucking freezing.”

Wydin sniffed at her. “What else? Waiting for him.”

“Then you’ll be waiting.” _This hole in the wall isn’t going anywhere._ And he could bang on the door if the jamb got stuck. “But suit yourself.”

* * *

Before he could really establish what appealed, he first needed to know what hadn’t.

His previous disguise was a bomb. They’d appeared a fairly safe venture; her height, her age. Lighter than the average build. One side a bit longer than the other, but that’d taken him a minute to notice himself. Conveniently underway toward business south of Karamja. Sporting an overgrown beard; possibly a talisman for luck on the water. More probably due to indolence.

Felix had taken hardly a moment’s look at the planes of their face, smooth-shaven, to the skin, even, his most scholarly portrayal of nonchalance painted over it, and let her eyes sweep forward.

As far as the facsimile of his body was concerned, beer was out of the question. Spirits, in their beautiful simplicity, did a patchwork Mahjarrat considerably less harm. Nursing a glass in a secluded corner, he’d angled himself to observe.

It might've soothed him a little to watch other people share his fate. Deck rats mowed their way through months of savings and didn’t lend her much consideration. His palette for features was refining, _refreshing_ , too, and he noticed similarities to his gaff in a captain posted at the bar. They wore a formidable amount of facial hair in a crimped, interlocking style, but while she’d yet to approach anything he could call interest, Felix _was_ at least talking to them.

* * *

“Still mean-muggin’ Sherry,” Burt muttered, glaring murderously over her shoulder.

Burt had been getting steadily more pissed off. As the evening crawled on and last call for both tabs and the kitchen rolled by, still he rumbled to himself, patrolling the length of the bar area, putting this or that into a helper’s hand to furnish the tables without having to break his vigil.

His irritation didn’t make any sense, but then, nothing had, lately.

Felix sipped at the last quarter of her pint, remiss. “What.”

“I’m tellin’ ya,” he reiterated impatiently, bending and jabbing a crooked pointer out of view. “Motherfucker drinks like a hole in the ground. S'chipped my damn paint. An’ he’s goin’ out that bleedin’ door if he don’t stop givin’ Sherry the eye.”

“Nobody is trying to fuck Sherry,” Felix droned. “Except me, I guess. Once. Sorry about that.”

“Nope,” Sherry agreed, stacking five coins on the bartop and sliding them over to Burt, who turned away to simmer with rage while he tilted a glass on its axis to keep the head from foaming over. “Nobody else’s fuckin’ me. And you’re paid up.”

“Kickin’ the creep out,” Burt declared, ignoring both of them.

“It’s not _mine_ ,” Sherry complained, waving off Burt’s blind attempt at providing him with the ale. “Water my bard. She’s gettin’ droopy over there.”

A few things, while Felix had it in her to care:

One. She considered herself a fair-minded individual. Burt, in all of his extreme paranoia and love of bready homebrews, was a nice guy. With a nice husband. And a nice, very illegal still. Felix wasn’t technically supposed to know all of those things, but as Sherry had explained – she was flush.

Two. Whoever sat behind her at present really, really didn’t deserve Burt’s ire. Mostly because he was thick like a tree, and related to this, by multiple, sordid tales of unsettled accounts, he was going to literally kick their ass through the door, whether he got it open first or not. This new one didn’t even hang right.

Three was Felix was as many deep in pint glasses, and the possibility they were cute hadn’t eluded her attention.

Felix scrabbled around in the bag at her feet for her coin purse. “What’s he been taking you for,” she asked, squinting into the dim filth under her boots as she felt for the clothed smoothness of precious metals.

“Rum. Two bottles,” Burt fumed from somewhere above.

“O-hohoho, no,” Sherry chuckled at whatever pitch and yaw he was occupying up there, too. “Oh, darlin’.”

Suppressing a twinge of what was going to become a serious case of spender’s remorse later, Felix's back straightened and she dropped her purse on the bar. “Send him another.”

Incredulous didn’t cover it. Sherry drank to keep from cackling, and it might’ve worked.

“ ** _Sorry_** _, lass? Didn’t’ya hear when I said I was goin’a’haul the crapsack over my knee?”_

She had. There _was_ a point at which drink began to blur the line between reason and charity, and Felix was aware of it, but she was also unfathomably tired. Even now, in what she would’ve called good company had anyone asked her yesterday.

As if it were the most laborious thing she’d ever done, Felix counted out each gold piece, stacking them in fives, grouping them in fours, and staring down Burt all the while.

It didn’t quite come to eighty when he put his fists on his hips and snorted at her. “Stop it.”

“I bet,” Felix said, cool as she could be halfway under the table, “that I can get him out faster than you.”

Now, she’d known Burt for near a decade. Him and his inn was safer than sleeping rough, and he’d made sure she knew it early on.

So when the lines that’d settled over his forehead in the intervening years got friendlier with each other, and he frowned hard enough it _would_ stick that way, Felix knew what was going through his mind.

“Go on, then.” Burt swept her coin into the trough behind the counter. He held her purchase out by the base, like a weapon. “And get ya damn phil’nthropic lay over with.”

Standing presented its own challenge, and it wasn’t quick to pass. “For the ooze.” Bag in hand, Felix used her vacated booth as a pushing-off point while she got her balance back, turning to judge who she’d gambled her week's living on. “Help me schlep this, Sherry.”

* * *

What he understood was that something a little odd was happening.

What he didn’t understand was why the captain burst into laughter as the bartender thrust a bottle over the bar and then started out for his corner with it in tow, Felix staggering on their heels.

Bringing other people into their affairs on the maiden voyage of becoming real machinations was probably a bad idea. But Sliske didn’t have a whole lot of time to consider how he felt about that before the captain came to a halt, popped the bottle down as if planting a flag, announced:

“Courtesy of the tramp.”

And doubled on back to needling the bartender, who was watching all of this with a kind of sparsely concealed repulsion.

Time had curled the label away at the edges. A sunny yellow tag with a brown sun, murkier where it was smeared on with the molasses that provided the rum its dull amber color.

Felix wasn’t papered over with maker’s marks, but her face shined a comparable hue under the brown, two bright rashes of blood beating in her cheeks.

Composing himself, Sliske squared the shoulders of a man pushing sixty and held out a calloused hand to shake.

When she neither shook it nor pulled a chair out for herself, he cleared the disuse from his throat.

“Thank you,” he said slowly. “Charmed to make your acquaintance.”

“I promised the bartender I’d kick you out,” Felix informed him flatly, sealing palms. “Thinking I should turn around and beat him to mince instead.”

Whether it was his utterly derailed stake-out strategy or her belligerent demeanor, the read he got was shallow.

She was angry, obviously. Drunk.

Their hands were still clasped. Not a stranger to running hot himself, the sensation was comparable to touching sheetmetal.

“I’ll give you the choice,” Felix explained.

Steeled to find out if the aging figure of a sailor would be able to fascinate, Sliske picked up the untouched rum and what he’d been working on. Their watery clinking rang in the silence of what appeared to be the majority of The Rusty Anchor spectating.

“I’d prefer it if you walked with me.”

Felix stepped back, and he took first one leg, and then the peg. She swayed there a moment, like waiting to know he’d found the floor, before resuming the lead in evacuating their small party from the premises, shooting a hostile look behind her as they went.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’d started with a fit of cholera.

Sword held aloft, a towering icyene faced the scene depicted below her:

Twin valleys, draped in cities. Tens of thousands of the Empire's citizens were about to wake, every one owed laying waste by her forces, the spiraling acreages of their idyllic towns dyed unassertive pinks and golds by a felted dawn.

On the opposing summit, a stately fortress, stitched in royal purples.

The orchestral pit attended, as much a part of Zariaspa’s appeal to her army as the simulations of the actor herself, brass altuphoniums a powerful speech delivered in her voice.

Mighty drumbeats urged the winged commander onward, up her grassy dais, a rolling encore of mallets that pulsed through the amphitheater as she leveled her blade at glacial Lassar and it's peaceful, outlying villages.

Wind met percussion on an incomplete minor triad and they faded like that together, the implied anticipation of events to come a crushing strain on the empathetic soul.

In that half-beat of silence preceding the charge, an ostiarius shepherding the uppermost stands could no longer hold their effluvia, and a man of the nobility seated in the row below them screamed into the face of that carefully manufactured tension without care for its fragility.

Diseases weren’t uncommon in Senntisten.

Why either had felt the need for their behavior was the subject of many subsequent interrogations.

Regrettably, the fit was its own augury.

Three ballerinos, four leads, and a deluge of stage workers had apparently been visiting the same well. Their agonies encouraged him to send healers, and he forbid anyone within that municipal block entry to the theatredome, but the damage had already been done.

The murrain traveled swiftly throughout his company. Not quite one by one they dropped out of the production. In a week’s time, his chief producer was completely indisposed, and what loyal patrons he'd cultivated among the races proving susceptible to diarrheal afflictions regarded any performances that could be carried off with a predictably healthy, bacillophobic horror.

Out of desperation, he consulted an emergency pool of talent provided by the interesteds; a mixture of wannabes and has-beens who’d offered their dignity in exchange for a foot in the door.

Utterly futile. Nobody remained in fit condition to mount a cast revival. They were all bloody sick.

So he’d made the trip to the valley’s prison ward and joined a meal with the northern block’s inmates. Want for a cast with sturdier stomachs, or even just a better incentive than fame to cooperate with daily rehearsals, drove him to make them an offer.

Felix, he’d come to find, believed her virtues circulated. That a system existed where the deeds of men saw tabulation into a greater record – which was technically true – but on an _omniscient_ scale, where these records were frequently exhumed and read back to some cosmic adjudicator. A more hypercritical version of the old _what goes around, comes around_.

And to be frank, he didn’t really buy it; he was too long involved with the people actually dishing out punishments.

But when Sliske stood there, with the full radiance of eternity burning down on him, he did feel able to say he understood what kind of duress those prisoners had undergone, donning clapboard covered in throw rugs, galloping on one another’s shoulders across painted fields, shouting in the name of Nimo the blue, knowing that the ones to make it without cracking or tripping through rehearsal would be granted pardons, and that anyone who didn’t would die in _Act IV_.

“They’re not going to like it,” he explained. “Gods are used to having what they want. Giving away the planet… that’s simply not in line with divine practice.”

**"Then eliminate them. And it won’t matter."**

* * *

The center was around the right height for a good, long reflection. Bending and yanking on his robe to roll the seams right-side in, Sliske let gravity do the rest.

Without speaking for his upper half, which he’d killed the majority of his ability to feel below the neck hours ago, his arches were sore. Flexing them against the sandy grooves of an unfinished floor was temporary relief. When he relaxed, pain thumped its dull protest.

Descending from a final inspection, Relomia hovered around the base. “It looks level to me.”

“This is the very last time I ever move this thing manually,” Sliske repeated, craning numbly to scowl at her. “Consider that an order.”

She joined him.

For a brief silence, they contemplated the scope and enormity of the vault. It was bare, but immense. Many times larger than what he’d been capable of excavating in a fit of overstimulated mania.

“I don’t get to know what this is all about, do I?”

 _There_ was a tone of voice he never enjoyed hearing. Sliske looked askance to meet eyes narrowed with frustration. “No.”

The shawl around her shoulders shifted where what was substantial enough to weigh anything pooled in concentric waves on the platform. He followed the ripples until they began to slope along the irregular cuts of stone that comprised the stair.

“Why?”

_Amat victoria curam._

A backbreaking amount of work remained to be done before he'd consider the chamber presentable. She couldn’t trip or falter. Each step needed to be measured, smoothed, and equalized.

“If I tell you,” he said, an exhausted affectation of his usual chicanery. “You’ll have to die.”

Relomia scowled at him and stood, or near enough. “Fine. Be impenetrable. And for that matter, I’d like to see you try to find a way to kill me.”

Then she left, likely to go sulk, the vapors of her skirt’s train vanishing around the hole where the portcullis would stand when he was up to it.

Once certain she wasn’t returning, Sliske laid out until his spine and crown agreed, and gradually, he let the coddle fade, denying his muscles their compulsive need to lock in the immediate discomfort that followed.

The restorative warmth living in his head did what it could. As it withdrew, he felt a coy tickle of resistance – not so much energy sapped away as vainly flirted with in passing.

Sliske tilted his chin a skosh farther. Ionized orange flashed across his nose. Five heartbeats later, and it came by again. Rising to both elbows, he twisted clear of it, squinting accusingly.

The elder artefacts weren’t alive. It’d taken Lucien some very clumsy extortion to prove as much, and his better judgement insisted to begin keeping the counsel of something that ate continents if somebody said _please_ wouldn’t be in compliance with the genie rule either way.

But regardless of his feelings on the matter, Jas had intimated sentience. Of a kind.

“Did you just try to _steal from me?_ ”

And the more time he spent around it, the less he could say confidently that the Stone of Jas was a some- _thing,_ and not a some- _one._

Sliske pursed his lips and picked up a hand, poised with claws extended, a deadly mimicry of caress. “Because I’ll be direct; whipping, choking, the occasional pun… I can abide those. But my gem is off the table.”

No response, of course. Above the hexagonal grooves patterning the surface like a berry, the Stone's ribbons of orange revolved soundlessly, a rare green spark of conflict from the lava tubes that irradiated the compound the only noise in the vault at all.

**_‘You will wait until they emerge.’_ **

They.

_‘Tabula rasa? Farewell, o' ye of little faith?’_

“How about this,” Sliske whispered, feeling absurd.

**_‘Anyone who attempts to interfere.’_ **

“I’ll trade.” He flexed his claws. “You show me yours. And I’ll show you mine."

_‘I’ve gone for broke on a thousand pages, but this is just… bad writing.’_

**_‘You will do as you are told.’_ **

_They_ didn’t exactly move, or speak, or so much as vibrate at a different frequency. Yet he understood that this was the closest to permission he was going to receive.

_A someone._

Sliske drew a breath evocative grand significance. He bent his wrist a few times, and then he stretched upward to lay every line from palm to fingertip flush against one of their nearest panels, just clear of the junction where the pattern progressed unseen beneath a new plinth.

Nothing.

_Obviously._

“Right. Now remember,” he said bashfully, spreading his fingers a little. “This _is_ my first time, so if you'd take the reins for a mome–”

* * *

Perhaps more than the average sapient, Sliske had known close calls.

Being rendered totally powerless was something he’d never experienced.

He couldn’t move, which was why he’d been silenced so effectively. A kind of fatuous, guttural hiss escaped him until he ran out of air.

* * *

Sight quit.

He might’ve lost consciousness for a while.

And he couldn’t remember breathing in – though he got the impression it was because custody of his lungs had been exchanged when words that wouldn’t have occurred to him formed of their own volition in his throat, one aching syllable at a time.

_“WHAT_

_DO YOU WISH_

_TO KNOW”_

* * *

She forgot to sleep.

Of course there were more desirable things to forget, like names. For what she wanted to remember, writing played a significant role in her daily routine. She’d incorporated repetition into habit until a pen came to hand, because often the world produced results in a particular sequence, and herbs were either scarce or costly when they weren’t downright impossible to obtain.

Sleeping, though. It’d always been an annoyance, and now that her body didn’t seem to remember what being tired was, it was a big fucking problem. No one told her to sleep, because she wasn’t talking to people that cared much, nowadays, and even so, the task set before her made rest an inconvenience. So Felix tread the earth across the continent for weeks at a time, oblivious to her own body, until everything was very hard to do, suddenly, and oddities started trespassing on her perceptions, and the culprit became apparent – _oh, right. I forgot to sleep again._

Drinking helped, but then it was difficult to stay ahead of herself. And though it was probably a trivial change to be upset about, given the general state of life, it took an _awful lot_ of drink to stay drunk.

Wincing, Felix allowed the wicket to bang into its hinge behind her, the incline of lithified foothills beneath her heels a firm reminder she was close.

She’d tried to save the effort, putting together the pieces and the people where their needs appeared obvious or practical. A poster with the best likeness of his face she could recall for a sharper eye’s rendition hung just about everywhere, now, circulated to Leela’s territory in the second week of Bennath and plastering the known four corners by the third.

_If you have any information on those pictured, their whereabouts, or a personal expertise with astronomy, please write to…_

It hadn’t produced much. Mostly a few attempts at solicitation and some alarmist ravings posted from a place Pete assured her shouldn’t exist, to say nothing of the junk mail.

Now it felt more important than ever she _find_ the fucker, because he was – potentially – fixing to kill her.

Thus, the walking, thus, staying awake, and somewhere on the road between Eastgate and the abandoned quarry, it’d begun to hit.

 _Not ideal._ Her path curved with a bend in the trail, breathing harsher from the strain presented by speed walking up the pass. _Could’ve slept in the tree. Or prior to hiking the Wolf._

Paterdomus emerged in the distance. Felix stopped before more than its pointed rooftop could crest the next set of tall, wraith-like birches ahead and looked around for scrub.

There were some nauseatingly familiar bushes by the nearest cliffside. She crouched beside them, pulling the bag off her shoulders.

Felix extracted the invitation box from the main flap and was going to throw the rest into natural cover for safekeeping when a glint of purple caught her attention.

_I shouldn’t. I don’t know what it does, yet._

_Might be useful._

_Might also tick him off._

Exhausted and paranoid, Felix spared a final thought for how unwise leaving part of a god unattended really was, stepped back into the road, and knelt.

“Don’t say weird shit this time,” she muttered.

What resembled a tastelessly ornamented trinket case offered her something distressingly like a giggle as she flipped its latch.

“That really tickles.” _Gods, please._ “Do it again.”

“No.” Bracing herself, she opened the lid until the glow spilled out into the twilight, tinting her hands and the rocky passage around her a spectral green.

“Oh, alright. One going up!”

Everything turned sideways, and sideways some more – the dizzying swirl of space folding, or her eyes becoming useless, or whatever means necessitated the sick joke of being flown from the ground to the sky by a talking jewel caddy.

Sucking down gorge, Felix peeled her cheek off the wide arc of a golden stone. The invitation box lay a few feet away. She left it there, favoring her knees as she took a deep breath and held it.

The pressure in her middle ear let up. Air currents whistled through the gaps in the landing zone. As soon as her legs felt trustworthy enough to stand she started making her way into the courtyard.

By all appearances the Empyrean Citadel was abandoned. Party streamers left torn and bleached by the elements turned silently in the wind, and there were no guards at the entrance this time, the tall doors beyond the defaced – or refaced – statue of Harold hanging ajar.

Inside the wind continued to sing shrill harmonies in the rafters, but the court was protected, if equally empty as the grounds beyond the hold. Felix blinked away dryness.

The birdcage was still there, the daises. Phantom jeers and memory of opinions snapped across the aisle echoed her footsteps as she climbed the stage, a moment’s hesitation delaying her despite a resolve that’d been more than insistent enough the entire trek.

_Armadyl doesn’t own this place anymore._

Beating a filmy gray layer of dust away, she blew on the resulting column that shot up to irritate her, and then she collapsed into the throne.

It was plush enough. For a while Felix just sprawled, breathing and gazing at nothing.

He wasn’t there.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t hear her.

“Because you’re obviously not an idiot,” Felix opened with, feeling her way through what she’d rehearsed in expectation of company but was prepared to state in the face of solitude, “and I can’t really afford to take anything you do or say for granted, I need you to understand a few things.”

Though she didn’t lack for height, the throne _had_ been commissioned for a god, and getting dirt on the upholstery couldn’t have become a hardass negotiator, but stirring circles by dangling her boots off the ground felt decisively childish, so she drew them closer, tucking them to the side under her legs.

“I have enough enemies. What I am sorely hurting for right now is allies.”

The rafters made the sounds all old buildings did, and it kept drawing her eye there, leaned back into the support of lacquer and velvet. Her bow dug between her shoulder blades, unyielding as any split of timbre sturdy enough to survive thousands of years buried in ice.

“You’ve intentionally misled me. Multiple times. This time you didn’t get your twisted way and you were punished.” Nothing to see, of course; just rhombuses of a sky growing lighter by the minute and the occasional dead bird. “Leniently, in my opinion, but you threatened him anyway. And then you threatened me.

“I won’t pretend I understand what you have to resent, because I’ve decided thinking about it for too long will put me in the position of being too fucking angry with you to mend fences. Because I see your current position as fair. Because you stole Akrisae, you stole _Death himself,_ and you kill, and you lie, and… it’s for what, exactly? Just to prove a point?”

There was a glaring omission in there, the loss of a titan too obvious a sin to list against someone who probably wasn’t even listening.

“I’m never going to trust you. The gods know you shouldn’t trust _me –_ I’d sooner see you and every last one of them ejected into the ether than impose your ugly worldviews on anyone I care about. But I don’t have a choice anymore. Guthix is–” _dead, “_ gone. Two gods are carving a scar into a mountain fighting over what’s left of him. Four more are vying for similarly sized claims, and one of _them_ is a _fucking vegetable_. You’ve succeeded. It’s chaos out there, and the longer it goes on, the more people are going to get hurt.

“Maybe you think you have to give them a taste of their own pride. Maybe you’re a sadist; I don’t know. But I brought him into this because I figured if anyone would impose some order on these bastards it'd be him, and you know what he said to me?”

Her speech was starting to appear in front of her, little clouds of breath, and when they receded it made her nose hum with the sort of numbness that took ages to thaw. Felix rubbed some feeling back into the cartilage and sniffed. “He told me they’d burn themselves out. That it’s small potatoes. That more important shit is on his plate.

“What I’m saying is you were right. It was a mistake. The only comfort I have is that I know he considers himself too far above them to join the dogpile. And it is a fucking dogfight out there. Faith people have buried deep in their hearts is crawling out with teeth bared. People I could’ve never imagined taking up a sword or killing their countrymen for anything, let alone _creed,_ are trying to debate the finer points of what is and isn’t humane, ethical, or _warfare _.__

“I’m going to do whatever I can to minimize the destruction, and you can consider that a promise. But if I have to keep looking over my shoulder, waiting for you to pop out of the fucking dark?”

Felix was shaking, and not entirely from the cold. Anger, dread, and irritation with the impending reality of his warning had kept her tense as a piano wire. Now those same emotions were keeping her awake. So instead of trying to bridle them, she used that jittery energy to get up.

“I don't know which of us would come out on top in a fight, but I have to sleep sooner or later.”

“When I do I want to know you won’t be waiting to slit my throat.”

“So I yield.”

“I want to make a deal with you.”

Swallowing the discomfort of projecting her voice into a huge, empty room, Felix stepped a slow circle until she faced the doors.

Nobody. Not even the rafters creaking, silenced somehow in the wake of her admission.

She had nothing else left to say.

This was her last idea, the posters an ancient nonstarter and the majority of their encounters initiated by him anyway.

_Yeah. He’s not here._

The sigh that left her took something that’d been essential to her tirade’s passion with it.

Felix turned to leave, contrite and ready to wake Drezel way earlier than was courteous so that she could sleep in one of his bathtubs. Maybe they were more comfortable than they looked.

Paces shy of the doors, she tried to swing forward her lagging boot and it stuck there.

The floor was all marble and glitz; flawless, no catches to snag on. Though a blip of confusion made her struggle to lift it regardless, the boot wasn’t moving, and in spite of the fatigue muddying her mind, she knew why.

Felix’s leading hand crept to touch the smooth knob leering over her right shoulder.

She got a lot more momentum from the stability of being so securely planted, and so the return hit of her bow being slammed into a stationary object mid-swing smarted in her palms, the curt, wooden slap of it bouncing around the high walls.

_He moves too damn fast._

Mostly still overhead, he’d caught the strike, his elbow level with her face, and he peered at her from underneath his hood with a smile she could’ve easily mistaken for benevolent if the curve of it hadn’t begun to stretch out around just _rows_ of hazardous-looking teeth.

To Felix, Sliske occupied a deceptively kind, nearly innocent mien. In what sparse crossings followed Jhallan’s sacrifice at the marker and Lucien’s subsequent demise, she’d thought of his bent shoulders and folded hands as reminiscent a beggar’s bowl, or the poorly contained goodwill of a concerned stranger, hesitant and too untrained to confer healing upon the injured. 

Right then, he looked exactly like what he was.

A predator.

“I’ll entertain some degree of pillow talk,” Sliske mocked quietly, glove squealing around the opposite handle. “But my time costs extra if you want to get violent.”

 _A predator with a terrible sense of humor._ “Let go.”

“This is a work of art. Treat it right, and it’ll last you an age.” He unwrapped his grip on the bow one finger at a time, leaving the thumb so that she had to weave it out herself. The resistance he offered was token – it fell into position behind her, prepared to swing again.

“Yeah, I’ll take that under advisement. And this?” Felix demanded, jerking illustratively.

Still too close to bode well, Sliske tilted his head until chin met the curious gap in his hood and parted it, smile wilting into a dangerously thoughtful neutrality. 

“I thought you wanted a deal.”

Felix stopped forcing the grasp of whatever magic he’d used to pin her sole. After indulging a second of pure, coarse fury, she unclenched her teeth.

The corners of his mouth crept back up.

“I did. Do,” Felix corrected, thoughts swimming a bit. “Would it have fucking killed you to dispense with the dramatics, just one time?”

“And ruin a beautiful soliloquy?” He waved a hand and she almost overcorrected, an embarrassing interval between the posture she’d devoted toward either _attack_ or _escape_ unprepared for release into neither.

In the end, she caught herself from behind by stabbing her bow into the floor and growling out the front end of a curse.

“I won’t kill you in your sleep.”

Head snapping up, Felix leveled her stare and her footing at the same time. “Really? Hey, what does _all bets_ mean to you?”

Sliske had none of her patience to start with and yet his condescension found a way to grate against the rawest ends of it. “Surely you can recognize _some_ duplicity.” He squinted pleasantly at her. “How does it go? Fool me once?”

She moved to reject that, but he kept on. “I’ve no need to capture or destroy you anymore. You’re completely in my pocket now, and you always will be.”

_You–_

“You fucking bastard,” Felix snapped unthinkingly, any lingering intent she’d brought into the citadel frying out on its doorstep. “You egotistical piece of shit. Fuck off _I’m in your pocket now_. What the hell does that even mean?” And she swiveled to leave, halfway to murderous.

“Oh, don’t _run_.”

She saw it happening, the creeping groan of the doors weight being shifted after so long stationary. They were too far off. By the time she threw a shoulder into the split right down the middle of them they’d clammed up tight.

Tactically, Felix knew herself to be at a disadvantage to virtually all but the most single-minded of opponents. Most prominent of this collection of weaknesses was foresight, particularly dead tired, and dependably when better judgements lost their vote to anger.

Backed against a door in a room without corners wasn’t a position she was fond of.

Any number of reasons said she shouldn’t. It was an unfamiliar weapon. Her aim was going to be impaired.

The gift Nex had bestowed on her for returning Zaros to Gielinor was inarguably still her best bluff.

Felix drew on him.

The arrow flickered between her fingers, but it held a shape.

Delicately, as though to gentle an animal, Sliske held out his hands. “I have a different offer for you.”

“Are you letting me out of here after?”

Summoning a projectile at all seemed to be most of the work. A weak if controlled line of throbbing black, it raced into the pointed rest, beating against an invisible barrier, eager to fly. Felix had a terrible feeling that if she were to loose the string it would bounce off of him like a twig.

“Because I’m listening, but my hearing goes kind of funny in a shoot-out.”

“Yes. You have my assurances. No tricks.”

His cool geniality didn’t surrender to her stare. To her mortification, when she raised her sights to the rafters and fired off into the dawn breaking through the slits there, he only relaxed further.

“I’m not sure I’ve said before, but that’s quite the arm.”

“Lots of practice,” she ground out resentfully. “What’s your offer?”

Now that he’d earned her attention, if not her civility, Sliske turned his back on her – and luckily for him, it wasn’t tempting enough to act on.

“A little tit for tat.” He didn’t go far, selecting a podium with a symbol she couldn’t make out and draping himself over it, one wrist propped under his chin and the other trapped under that elbow. “Since you’ve admitted to me this… desire to abrogate some of that tedious responsibility on your shoulders.”

Felix grimaced. “To my immediate regret. And?”

“And I’ll play a game with you, whenever you’d like. Just come here and take a load off; hell, consider us officially at armistice.” _A truce,_ he proposed, but the angle he’d set his head at was a taunt. “A question for a question. One per visit. No lies.”

Actually, his whole way of looking at her today seethed with a kind of barely-restrained challenge, like everything he was saying had a purpose beyond what it meant, and Felix was reminded of the numerous cautions levied against this very scenario. Of the times people with clear, _informed_ reasoning to guard her from Sliske’s proclivity for twisting logic to his benefit had done so.

An honest answer to _any_ question no matter how innocuous likely carried the potential to become irreparably damaging ammunition _somewhere_ down the line.

 _Which… Okay._ Swaying on her feet, Felix let another sigh saw in and out of her nose. _If I play my cards right.._.

“I get to ask first. Every time.”

He looked genuinely surprised. “That hardly seems fair. I accept. What’s your question?”

Doing her best to shake the shocking ease of his capitulation, Felix threw him one without really thinking about it. “Why the fuck are you doing all this?”

“Ah,” Sliske groaned flatly. “No, not that one. A different one.”

“Excuse me?” Felix lifted her bow and dropped it into the netting over her vest to catch there. Letting her weight fall back into the doors, which ticked fibrously a few times in complaint but stubbornly refused her egress, she crossed her arms. “A different one like how?”

He made what appeared to her to be a vague attempt at signaling apology. “For questions we can’t answer, another may be substituted.”

“And what defines an unanswerable question?” Felix asked incredulously. Sliske rolled his neck in a gesture that indicated psychological pain for her. “Never mind. That’s bullshit, but fine. If it goes both ways.”

“Oh, darling,” he sneered, that filthy voice he'd used when she’d screamed at him the last time they’d been in this room together, matching wits like apples and oranges. “It _does_. Try again.”

Mind games were tactics-adjacent. A long minute of trying to grasp for a cunning enough interrogative he wouldn’t quibble over it, and Felix caved to her own curiosity.

“What did Zaros do to you, specifically?”

If nothing else she’d done had, at least that caught him off guard. He was tipped back far enough that she could watch the strange bumps that hung over his eyes move up a hair as he stared at her.

Her shoulder was beginning to share the ache from being pressed into artisanal hardwood with her neck when he twitched a foot and, curiously, crossed his legs.

“He was weak.” Sliske widened his eyes, a _what did you expect from me?_ worth of scolded innocence dwelling in the black there. “He allowed himself to be killed by a mortal–a mortal that turned out to be exhaustively annoying with their newfound power. Nothing could be worse than a leader that’s failed you and your kin. Now, what he did to _you._ There lies a question worth asking.”

Felix felt her lack of belief show, shifting on a heel to cross her own boots. “Barely anything, if you count–”

“ ** _I’m not asking.”_**

The outburst was over as soon as it began.

If she’d ever entertained doubts about whether the mishegossing, adulatory register he inhabited could slip toward the inhuman, they were gone.

“Gods–fuck _sake_.”

Hands flat against the door and chin about horizontal with her chest, Felix almost spared a worry for rattling so visibly before she decided instead that, yes, his outside voice was scary, but the way he went about smoothing away the rigidity in his claws, pointed in at the trailhead of deep scratches in the podium – _that_ was a whole lot more disturbing.

“It was free. Calm down.”

“ _You_ calm down,” he deflected, sulking into himself, adopting a defensive stance similar to hers before _he’d blown his fucking top_. “I know you, Felix, more than you think. And you’re every bit the opportunist I am.” Licking the pout off his lips, he tried a smile. “Play fair.”

“You’re actually sick,” she wondered. Sliske barked a laugh. _I’m so ready to get out of here._ “Ask.”

Felix had never seen a Mahjarrat in a state of pleasure before. The closest had been Azzanadra, the strident figure he cut into any room's wallpaper going pliant at the edges with one word from his new, bassy Lord, but most of them, Wahisietel especially, tended to express nothing – which she was beginning to understand the motivations for – or flagrant disdain.

She slid and groped aimlessly across the doors still waiting to be torn open behind her as Sliske raised a few destructive claws to his mouth in time to conceal those sharp, plentiful teeth.

“You don’t like me, and you don’t trust me.” One of them dented the already-thin bow of his upper lip. “But what do you _think_ of me, really? Does anything come to mind?”

“That’s two,” Felix whispered, and cleared her throat, abrupt, blinking hard. “Questions.”

Something very fucking bad was happening behind that hand.

“Are they?”

_They are, and so was that._

“Really?” He sounded like he was sitting on a prick and Felix wasn’t sure how that could even be possible. “Why do you think they’re so different?”

 _“Stop,”_ she hissed.

A pressure building in her head relented some.

Sliske, for his part, swallowed, which Felix had zero opinions about.

“If you _enchant_ me.” Closing her eyes seemed like the correct move to alleviate the haze of it, and yet it did little. Instead, she was gifted with the brief reminder that her body was feeding on adrenaline, or Guthix, and that if she didn’t unlock her knees soon, she was going to pass out. “I can’t be _honest_ with my answer, can I?”

He stamped a sole on the floor, like he resented being caught out for trying to break her mind, mumbled, “Fine,” and the heaviness was gone.

Blood pounded laps through her for a couple rotations of a clock before Sliske became impatient. “Well?”

Felix chanced a look.

Same aviansie court, same Mahjarrat. Although the _no tricks_ clause was, in her opinion, forfeit, and her composure was officially fucked with a capital F.

If she could bring herself to lay prone any time soon it was going to be on the floor, nowhere near the dark, and preferably for hours.

“I don’t,” she said, unable to help herself and an incompetent liar on her best days. “Think of you.”

Oddly enough, he almost let it sail. An unkind wrinkling of his nose spoiled the generosity in his voice. “And yet here you are.”

 _Gods._ “Because you _threatened_ me! I was afraid! Shit, all I _could_ think about was you, slinking around in my shadow the entire journey here, waiting for a moment you deemed poetic enough to strike.”

“But now you _know_ I’m not so bloodthirsty as that, darling,” Sliske insisted, peering at her with large eyes again. “I gave you my word.”

 _Stop. Calling me that._ “Which means so much.”

“Felix,” he said simply. “You’re hurting my feelings.”

_You have those?_

But he did, of course.

He snarled when he thought he’d been slighted. He grinned in the presence of fortuitous events. He chortled at his own jokes.

Sliske emoted in ways, act or no, that were unmistakable for their counterparts. To believe otherwise would be denying the proof of her own senses. He could posture her to death all he liked. Other people still managed to, by turns, nettle and amuse him somehow, and most of all he didn't seem able to resist being smug when any of it went his way.

“Maybe it’s all a part of your… theatrics. But I think, for somebody better at pretending to be someone they aren’t than anybody I’ve ever met, you give up a whole lot more of yourself than you believe. That’s what I think of you.”

Felix waited for him to pry at her, to wheedle and complain.

The doors clunked, once, and then she had to step forward into her height because they were opening.

"When you tire of the crowds," Sliske said, practically glaring her out the door.

She didn’t wait for him to reconsider.

The invitation box made an identically perverse comment when Felix pried it open, but she barely listened, still expecting the sensation of her feet fastening to the ground.


End file.
